No Room for America Left in Those Jeans

In October, International Textile Group, acquired by a private equity firm a year ago, announced plans to close the storied Cone Denim White Oak plant in Greensboro, N.C.

That factory was a 112-year-old shrine to bluejeans and the last major manufacturer of selvage denim in the United States.

The blow was most immediate among the plant’s roughly 200 employees, as well as in Greensboro — a.k.a. “Jeansboro” — itself. The company filed notice that it would lay off 208 people.

Customers were also distressed. For star-spangled denim-heads and bearded coastal creatives, the White Oak label long served as a badge of American honor — and as an entry ticket into a subculture united around a love of classic American clothing brands.

“It’s a national tragedy,” said Michael Williams, the founder of the influential men’s wear site A Continuous Lean. “The mill represents tradition, pride and the expertise that gets woven into some of the world’s most revered fabrics. History can’t be rewritten, and when the plant closes, Americans will have lost yet another piece of our national identity.”

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That factory was a 112-year-old shrine to bluejeans and the last major manufacturer of selvage denim in the United States.CreditChase Pellerin

The news came as a shock. A couple years ago, Mr. Williams, who also runs a marketing company that represents heritage brands like Red Wing and Levi’s, wrote a paean about his visit to the White Oak plant.

What he saw there, he said in an interview, was denim done the right way — not mass-produced on modern looms (although the plant has plenty of those too), but painstakingly made on clanking 1940s American Draper X3 shuttle looms that churn out denim featuring a tighter weave, more interesting textures and of course, the de rigueur selvage stitching on the inside seam that jeans lovers proudly reveal by rolling their cuffs.

Personality comes at a cost — apparently to the company, for starters. A company spokeswoman cited the usual factors — changing market demands and foreign competition — as reasons it plans to close the plant, even though it was once the world’s largest, and long supplied the denim for Levi’s iconic 501 jeans.

Personality, it must be said, also comes at a cost to consumers. A pair of Tellason’s John Graham Mellor jeans, for instance, featuring White Oak denim and oozing with street cred (John Mellor is the real name of the Clash’s Joe Strummer, in case you need to be told), sells for $230.

For much of the past decade, that’s a cost that the cool kids apparently were happy to bear, which accounts for the explosion of retro-inflected denim brands (Tellason, Raleigh Denim, Taylor Stitch and Buck Mason, to name just a few) that used White Oak denim as a pillar of their branding.

It’s not 2006 anymore, however. Hipsterism is dead (or is it just ubiquitous?), the economy is iffy, and the cheap, disposable ethos of fast fashion has made its mark. That makes it tough when you’re in the slow fashion business.

Too many consumers “simultaneously complain about imported products, job loss and low wages, and then buy their jeans at Costco, with the same brand name as the bacon, toilet paper and dish soap in their cart,” said Tony Patella, a founder of Tellason, based in San Francisco, in a reference to Costco’s Kirkland brand.

Even before Cone Mills made its announcement, however, some premium indie brands that once prominently displayed the “Made in the U.S.A.” label were starting to embrace a new globalism. The New York brands Unis New York and Outlier now produce much of their clothing in Portugal.

“Italian quality at Chinese prices,” explained Brad Bennett, who runs the men’s wear site Well Spent.

And founders of Tellason, Buck Mason and Taylor Stitch all said in interviews that they planned to look to Japan for their denim, once their Cone supply runs out.

This is hardly surprising. America may have invented bluejeans, but Japan turned them into a religion. Ultra-premium Japanese brands like Iron Heart and the Flat Head have reverse-engineered the all-American Brando-biker-rebel aesthetic to such a convincing degree that they might as well be sewn in Milwaukee, alongside the Harley-Davidson plant.

Even clothiers that seemed eager to wave the flag are suddenly sounding like globalists.

“As much as the Trump administration is touting ‘America First,’ we believe we live in a global world, and provenance is becoming less important,” said Michael Maher, a founder of Taylor Stitch, which is based in San Francisco.

So much for the days when tattooed Brooklyn web designers and rifle-toting Montana ranchers seemingly stood arm in arm, united by their common love of Filson bags, Red Wing boots and White Oak denim. While virtually everyone says they want to keep jobs in the United States, “Made in the USA” has also become politicized, since the Trump administration attempted to seize the “Buy American” impulse for itself.

Maybe jeans enthusiasts simply have other stuff on their plates to think about.

“Considering just how bad the news has been lately, the Cone Mills closing is easy to feel unfazed by — or, at least, to lose in the fray,” said Mr. Bennett of Well Spent. “That’s not to say it’s not still a colossal bummer. But compared to mass deportations, senseless spree killings and environmental decimation, it’s small potatoes.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the date when an article by Michael Williams about the Cone Denim White Oak plant was published. It was two years ago, not two months.